[OSM-talk] advertising

[Christoph Eckert]

Hi Steve,

> It's still owned by me in fact. I was planning to hand it to the  
> foundation when it expires next month on the third anniversary.

Etienne's post was a huge step forward, clearly stating that OSMF was 
not introduced to control the OSM project. At the current situation it 
thus would IMO be a confidence-building step to clearly separate the 
OSMF domain from the project's domain. I'd like to grab the occasion to 
make the following proposals about the domain issue:

* openstreetmap.org gets kept by you. You generously leave it to the 
project as you already did during the past years since 2004. OSMF gets 
its own domain name.

* openstreetmap.org gets handed to OSMF. OSMF continues to generously 
leave it to the project while getting its own domain name.

* openstreetmap.org gets handed to any other individual of the project 
who acts as a confidant elected by the project members by popular vote. 
OSMF gets its own domain name.

* openstreetmap.org gets handed to OSMF. Physically, it gets shared 
between the project and OSMF. The main page provides two links to both 
the projects main page as well as the OSMF main page, both hosted under 
the same hood.

My favourite is the third idea. OSMF is a british organisation, thus 
making it difficult to project members outside the UK to keep track of 
what's going on and how things are organised. If we merge OSMF and the 
OSM domain, people might think that OSMF is already organizing all 
stuff like fundraising and organisation, probably reducing the interest 
of people outside the UK to start own fundraising activities.

The third option would thus make it easy to build further national 
foundations which can do fundraising and donating money to buy and run 
the needed infrastructure. I'm pretty sure in this case the germans 
would be the first ones to found »openstreetmap.org e.V.«, thus 
allowing us to get donations from companies while those are allowed to 
use the donation for accrual pruposes (that's an important legal aspect 
to get donations).

> Cue stage left conspiracy theories of Evil Steve turning it in to a  
> porn site or something... mmmmm geoporn.

Mapping and rejoicing in the resulting map just *is* porn ;-) .

Hope this all makes sense & best regards,

ce